[tex-live] One step closer

[Frank Küster]

Ken Brooks <kenb at rpath.com> wrote:

> Please don't lose patience with me; I'm digging through a lot of docs and 
> getting closer.
>
> I followed the doc's advice and ran configure with
> --prefix=/usr/share/texmf --datadir=/usr/share
> and let the makefile install the resulting world.
> Somehow I don't think that was quite it, because I'm seeing paths that 
> involve /usr/share/texmf/texmf.  Here's a scenario (output broken into 
> lines for easier reading):

--prefix=/usr should be sufficient.  This will make datadir=/usr/share.
Your using "--prefix=/usr/share/texmf" is the cause for the additional
texmf directory showing up.  

What do you want to achieve?  Merge all TEXMF trees into one?  I don't
think this is a good idea.

> Questions:
> 1. I'm not quite clear from the doc how to determine exactly what 
> subtrees are driven by --prefix and which ones are driven by --datadir. 

./configure --help says:

  --prefix=PREFIX         install architecture-independent files in PREFIX
                          [/usr/local/teTeX]
  [...]
  --datadir=DIR           read-only architecture-independent data in DIR
                          [PREFIX/share]

So it's clear that you need datadir only if you do not want
PREFIX/share.

> Or why it looked in /usr/share/texmf/texmf/texconfig instead of 
> /usr/share/texmf/texconfig where tcfmgr really is.  So what made it look 
> for tcfmgr where it didn't install it?

That was your specification of prefix.

> 2. Which makes better sense: to have /usr/share/texmf and 
> /usr/share/texmf-dist etc. as siblings?  Or to have texmf-dist etc. all 
> exist under an overarching texmf directory?

If you're building TeXLive for a local installation, it might make sense
to have one texmf directory below /usr/local with everything in it (but
then you need to add the bin directory to the path).  Usually, however,
and in particular if you're building packages for a distribution --- and
it looks like this, with your installing stuff in /usr, not
/usr/local ---, it is better to have independent TEXMF trees directly
below /usr/share.  On distributions following the Linux FHS, texmf-var
should be /var/lib/texmf, not /usr/share/texmf-var.  This may also make
sense for non-Linux systems that know the concept of separating static
and dynamic hierarchies.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)